Before I begin I have a suggestion for Americans regarding healthcare. I looked online for some data regarding costs for the average person and not for a family. What I found was somewhere between five hundred and seven hundred dollars per month for the silver plan. One can only assume the gold or platinum plans are pricier. After the end of the pandemic era subsidies, the cost per month for the live person example I found is estimated to increase to twenty eight hundred dollars per month
I’m sure that there are variances depending on insurance plans, but a non-partisan outfit I googled was estimating confidently that the price hike is going to be an average of seventy five percent, and higher for many plan buyers. I’m thinking that twenty eight hundred dollar ladies plan is more expensive because she’s sixty two.
So she’s old and likely has a health issue or two.
Still, that’s fucking amazing, and assuming those numbers are correct and common to a few hundred million Americans, I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that the numbers are somewhat stress inducing. Laying in bed at night staring at the ceiling with what the fuck stress induction.
This lady is basically buying a decent used car every three months, so she doesn’t have to sell her house when something inevitably goes wrong with her health.
So, I was thinking that now that Tik Tok is in the hands of one of Don’s American buddies, that said buddy should create his version of go fund me and call it Sick Tok. Kind of a crowd funding forum that centralises the healthcare needy so they don’t depress everyone else making stupid reaction videos.
Actually now that I think about diversifying Tic Tok, maybe they can cater to the gay and lesbian communities with Chick Tok and Dick Tok, and to rednecks with Hick Tok. That way your short form video’s won’t be a mess with Subaru maintenance tips followed by a tutorial on ammunition calibers.
Anyway, I’m going to segue from Subaru back to my title thought.
Maintenance.
It’s that time of year in Canada. Winter tires, snowblower belts, furnace firing probes and a variety of other seasonal chores that if ignored are going to be problematic. I’ve dealt with those and other maintenance issues my entire life, but I’ve got to say that the older I get the more painful they become. Which is odd, because you’d think that after years of practice that these tasks would become a little bit time consuming but relatively effortless. So, while I was rubbing steel wool over the furnace probes I came to the realization that all maintenance issues are a much bigger pain in the ass than they were when I was younger.
My blood pressure going up trying to reinsert the miniature fucking screws into the probe bracket provided a perfect example of what I’m trying to illustrate. I’ve done this before. It shouldn’t be an issue, but for some reason it’s an issue.
I concluded that when I was younger that for some strange reason I wasn’t affected as much by shit breaking down or malfunctioning. Maybe the lesser concern was because I hadn’t experienced the inconvenience from a clogged toilet pipe or a non-furnacing furnace. But now I’ve got all that experience and I know how much trauma is going to be involved when you have to cut a sewer pipe and the juice surrounding a giant hair wad splatters onto your arms and face.
So, I think my increased anxiety is directly related to those experiences.
I’ve been motivated to consider maintenance lately because of an uptick in fuck up frequency over the last few weeks. All three of our bathrooms have had plumbing issues and one of our roof air vents developed a leak. Also my vehicle is making a noise I don’t like at all. I think I’ve solved the plumbing problems. The ensuite was an airlock and the biggest issue with that turned out to be emptying the lady stuff from the cabinetry. That and the fact I got Drano on me when I had to break the p-trap because the Drano didn’t drain. I only wondered about the Drano on my skin after the towels we used to clean up the mess were permanently bleached from their original color. But, my skin was resilient and didn’t peel or burn. My hands just smelled industrial for a few days and a few showers.
The main bathroom required replacement of the toilet tank internals, and I made that problem much more prolonged by not reading the bloody installation instructions. The downstairs bathroom hot water flow dilemma was solved by rerouting the flex stainless line and getting rid of the kink. The roof was another matter. I had to call for reinforcements and I ended up going into the attic a few times. Chris the roofing guy was awesome. But going into the attic to check the damage was not awesome. I had pretty much concluded that the damage was going to be significant if the dripping water had made it all the way to the basement ductwork. But it turned out that the damage was minimal and all I had to do was replace some insulation after I dried out the one area that was damp. Three trips into the attic sucked but in the grand scheme of things it could have been much worse.
And while Chris was replacing one roof vent I decided that he might as well replace all three, because I really don’t want to go back into the attic again anytime soon. By the way, Chris doesn’t work for free and that’s another determining factor to maintenance stress. The maintenance itself is generally cost manageable. But depending on how long a problem has been festering without being maintained means the repair cost can be painful.
This is another lesson I’ve learned over time. So when I miss a warning sign and get a surprise, then my stress level goes up exponentially. Enough of those situations and a person begins to really dislike surprises, because past debacles have shown you the potential for how shitty the reality can be based on a warning sign. It’s like discovering a new mole on your neck and then finding out its malignant melanoma. In this case a few water drips on the downstairs ductwork could have meant the attic was soaked, and I was looking at replacing saturated joists and insulation with a side worry of mold.
But we caught it early enough that it wasn’t a fucking disaster.
I’m taking my vehicle in tomorrow, so by the end of the day I should know what’s going on. The noise suggests a power steering pump, which I googled to find out that it’s seventeen hundred dollars before paying the mechanic to install the fucking thing. So, I’m hoping it something else.
But regardless of what the problem is, it’s a challenge to leave an auto shop these days without forking over a grand.
Anyway I’ve concluded that ignorance is bliss as far as maintenance goes, but non-maintenance is worse and it’s expensive. As a result, my lifetime of experience with wear and tear has taught me a couple of things. Namely everything eventually burns down, blows up, clogs, leaks, wears out or sinks. Our job is to hold off entropy and stress about it.
The end.